~ the illustrated garden studio blog

Tag Archives: local food

Ahhh… Cooler temperatures are finally here, and the front-yard garden is thriving in the absence of oppressive heat and hungry insects. Broccoli and cabbages line the front walk, hemmed with a few multiplier onions and some sprawling purple petunias at one end. This bed was created in a single early October afternoon, by double-digging the existing topsoil with a spade and then hoeing in a two-inch layer of clean, crumbly black mushroom compost. (I use mushroom compost because human sewage sludge — delicately referred to as “biosolids” in the federal regulations that allow it to be lumped in as compost and sold to unsuspecting gardeners — is frequently lurking in commercial bagged manure products. Ewwww.)

At the far end, some Brussels sprouts snuggle up to a row of romaine lettuce. Next week, when the romaine is harvested, I’ll fill in their little slice of real estate with some yellow globe onions. After several years of large-scale gardening, I really love working on a more intimate scale… planting and transplanting just a few square feet at a time provides a constant parade of assorted produce. I probably need to exercise more self-control in this area, though. Does anyone really need nine varieties of lettuce? Salads, anyone?

Some of the aforementioned lettuces are in the “baby bed” next to the driveway. I set out seedlings very close together and they grew in a leafy mound that can be gradually eaten as the baby lettuces are thinned out, allowing the remaining plants to reach full size. These little fellows are Tango Early Oakleaf, Lolla Rosa and Red Sails, all from Good Scents Herbs and Flowers in Robertsdale, Alabama. In other beds are Deer Tongue, Arugula and Tom Thumb.

Gypsy sweet peppers, Buttercrunch lettuce, more Oakleaf, onions and giant mutant basil share one raised bed. Each bed is 4×4 and 10 inches high, filled with equal parts peat moss, mushroom compost and vermiculite. I use pine needles for mulch. Thanks to a trio of towering longleaf pines overhanging the yard, mulch falls conveniently out of the sky every day.

Meanwhile, the newer raised bed is home to Red Bor kale, Swiss chard, and some upwardly mobile heirloom snap peas on a scrounged-bamboo-and-Zip-tie trellis.

My backyard is small, and only a few precious spots receive the full sun that herb plants crave. Some of the sunniest real estate is a skinny strip against the south side of a storage shed. The peppermint in the background, doing its level best to climb out of a wooden crate, sprouted from a single cutting in August.A pocket garden at one end of the shed has snap peas, bulb fennel, cardoon and a few leftover lettuces. And that protective fence embracing all the backyard plantings — the hardware store refers to it as rabbit wire, but it’s beagle wire to me.

There was a beautiful Eastern Black Swallowtail in the fennel patch yesterday. This morning, the herb’s tender green shoots were peppered with tiny butterfly eggs. The little orbs are pale yellow now, but they will turn black just before they hatch into small caterpillars. In several stages, these fast-growing creatures will pass through increasingly vivid color patterns — all the while steadily consuming an impressive quantity of fennel, parsley and dill. Individuals lucky enough to avoid hungry wasps will eventually transform into a chrysalis and, finally, something that looks a lot like this:

(c)2009 Val Webb

Meanwhile, we have defaulted to our usual steamy south Alabama late-summer gardening schedule. Manual labor is now limited to really, really early in the morning. We’re prepping beds for fall planting, checking our saved seed and picking those die-hard eggplant and peppers… and some scrumptious ambrosia canteloupe that the Perfect Man incorporated into an experiment in edible landscaping.

Summer is also canning time. Last week, it was green tomato chow-chow… and this week, it was blueberry jam. The hardest part is not opening the jars immediately and devouring the carefully preserved contents. It’s a treat to live with a man who has impressive food preservation skills! (Here’s a tip for any guys out there who might be contemplating an online dating service: just be sure your profile includes the fact that you’re inordinately fond of Mason jars and pressure cookers, and then stand back.)

When it comes to scary subject matter — the stuff you try not to think about when you wake unexpectedly at 2 a.m. — Stephen King can’t hold a candle to Poisonous Plants of the Southern United States. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen to you within 48 hours of, say, nibbling a little lantana from your curbside landscaping, this handy guide from West Virginia University will tell you in excrutiating detail. (Don’t read the lantana section if you are about to have lunch. You’ve been warned.)

Eeeeeeeeek!

As the grandmother of two toddler girls who love to pick flowers, I’m all for nontoxic landscaping. Better yet, edible landscaping. So this year, while our regular backyard garden is doing its usual exuberant summer thing…

… some food crops have replaced traditional landscape plants on the “public” side of the fence. Five itty-bitty Bush Pickle cucumber plants, tucked next to a privacy fence and around the foot of an antique urn, have produced several dozen fat seven-inch cukes and show no signs of slowing. No sign of wilt or insect infestation, either — which, here in the coastal subtropics, is cause for rejoicing.

We tried a ten-foot row of Greasyback Cornstalk beans, a wonderful heirloom that was my great-grandmother’s garden favorite, against a section of privacy fence. A strip of plastic bird netting is tacked to the fence posts to give the beanstalks something to grab. I’m watering them with a dipper from our algae-rich fish pond, and they’re producing lots of characteristically knobby, slightly shiny green beans. Some catnip and St. Francis finish off the little bed.

There’s something very satisfying about landscaping with table fare. Our lawn crops over the past two years have expanded to include citrus, blueberries and culinary ginger, and we want to keep moving in that direction. Eating the yard isn’t for everyone — there are a lot of folks living in suburban housing developments with restrictive covenants, for example, and inner-city gardeners whose street gardens are fraught with unforeseen hazards.

But, personally, I love the idea of yanking out a poisonous invasive and replacing it with something the grandbabies can happily harvest. Hey, lantana! Let’s see you do this:

This gardener took a break from tending his rattlesnake beans and tomatoes, and gave us a quick tour.

It was Saturday, and we were rambling around Pensacola’s first New Urbanism neighborhood — a whimsical 20-acre community called Aragon. We turned a corner and there it was: a lovely community garden, divided into individual family plots and hemmed all around with a white picket fence. Each family has a rectangular plot in the public space, and about two-thirds are currently under cultivation. The garden appears to be designed to encourage its use as a gathering place, with porch swings on one side and a big playground on the other. Brick walkways and trellises of sweet-smelling Carolina jasmine bisect the garden property (our friendly gardener pointed out that the jasmine probably wasn’t the best choice for this location, though, since its big woody roots keep snaking into the vegetables).

Some Florence fennel and a big ol’ rosemary.

Florida summers are hot, hot hot. The community garden at Aragon has a sprinkler system that comes on automatically, three times each week.

Here in south Alabama, we flirt with winter but the relationship never lasts. We’re already well into our growing season, with pea vines waving overhead and tomato plants racing to put on some size before the arrival of the rowdy insect hordes who show up to party all summer. We know that by July, when the mercury rarely dips below 90 degrees, gardening will be bearable only before sunrise or during a steady rain. But in April, anything is possible.

I try to attend the Festival of Flowers every spring, to soak up some gardening inspiration. The event provides a sprawling patchwork of blooms from around the world — plus locally grown orchids, landscape architecture installations, a whimsical tablescape competition, a gardening vendors’ marketplace and a slate of expert speakers and demonstrations. Fun!

Among the usual ikebana arrangements and displays of backyard reflecting pools, this year’s exhibit tent was populated with a surprising number of edible landscape elements. There were hedges incorporating kumquat trees and rabbiteye blueberries. Windowboxes were artfully arranged with herbs and edible flowers. One local company advertised a 4×4 foot raised bed (the finished product, all dark stained wood and spindles, looked almost like a piece of furniture) installed and planted with your favorite seasonal veggies.

The advice booth, staffed by members of Master Gardeners, was all about the kitchen garden this year:

And I couldn’t help lusting after this beautiful 1955 Ford pickup, all covered in locally grown food crops. (Sigh.)

At the container gardening display, a repurposed kitchen sink becomes a home for lettuces and garlic chives:

And the usual displays — the ones that dealt with flowers or landscape design — were as beautiful as always. So here, for all my snowbound gardening friends, is a little bit of spring. Enjoy!

When local clocks read 10:34 this morning, the sun will slip across the plane of the Earth’s equator and begin carving its daily arc through the southern end of our sky. So, despite temperatures that remain stubbornly in the upper 80s, Fall is well and truly here. It’s time to plant the winter garden.

We’re stumbling out of bed at sunup this week, turning the soil in each plot by turn, emptying our compost bin of the crumbly black goodness that has cooked there all summer long. (Atticus has discovered that a freshly vacated compost bin makes an excellent midmorning napping spot.) The cabbage crop — 50 tender transplants of three varieties — are tucked into their big bed now. The curly leaf kale seeds have been broadcast in their own sliver of real estate, so that we can thin them out at finger size for a vitamin-rich addition to the salad bowl. The lettuces will be next, and then our broccoli and cauliflower sets. Collard greens, that hardy southern delicacy, will go at the far end of our garden property next to their New Year’s Day menu partner: field peas. And good old butternut squash, blessedly resistant to the squash vine borers that are the scourge of our subtropical climate zone, will round out our cool-weather garden list. Mmmmm.

We’re in the final countdown before the 2008 Eat Local Challenge. Tonight, The Perfect Man is experimenting with homemade feta cheese. At midweek, I’ll start working on some preparatory bread baking… and on Thursday, we’ll check on a weekly farmers’ market we’ve heard about. By this time next week, I hope to have a basic inventory of locally grown edibles to get the month started. I’ll be posting a daily log as the Challenge rolls along.

I have discovered during planting times that the meditative rhythm of turning the soil under my shovel occasionally unearths old memories along with a lot of earthworms. This week, musing over the miraculous transformation of our kitchen garbage into heavy wheelbarrow loads of compost, I remembered how my three daughters first grasped the basics of organic gardening as preschoolers. By the time each was three or four years old, the concept of “compost is good, commercial fertilizer is bad” was defended with the zeal only a bossy little girl can deliver.

One weekend, while I showed handmade tiles at a local art festival, all three girls bought wooden stick horses from a toymaker in a neighboring booth. “Help me think of a name for my horse,” my youngest daughter said. “He’s a wild stallion.”

I explained that wild stallions in books sometimes have names that make them sound powerful and dangerous: Wildfire, or Cyclone, or Widowmaker. She thought for a moment or two, then looked up with a smile. “Thanks,” she said, and galloped off to join her sisters.

A little later, when I overheard her as she pranced by on her newly named steed, I realized that she had named her horse for the most hazardous thing a four-year-old organic gardener could think of:

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